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If you’re Canadian and crafty and determined to go overseas to sexually abuse children, there is little the government, police or other authorities can do to stop you.

In fact, Canada’s public safety minister agrees there are serious gaps in the system that monitors convicted sex offenders.

It’s possible no one will know when convicted sex offenders leave Canada. It’s also possible no one will know when they return to the country, or where they have been. And in between, they are free to commit shocking crimes against the globe’s most vulnerable citizens.

Since Jan. 1, 1998, 212 Canadians have been convicted abroad of sexual crimes against children and asked for help from their government, according to figures released by Public Safety Canada to the Star.

But here at home, under a 1997 law which makes it possible to prosecute Canadians for crimes committed outside our borders, there have been only five known convictions for child sex tourism.

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Under the current rules, a convicted sex offender plotting to abuse a child abroad would not break the law by travelling to the scene of his intended crime in a popular sex tourism destination.

“You could plan it, you could execute it and pretty well get away with it,” says Mark Hecht, a University of Ottawa law professor and the legal counsel for Beyond Borders, an organization that fights global child exploitation.

“In terms of an integrated system where we could monitor, track and where necessary prevent registered sex offenders from travelling, we just don’t have the infrastructure. We don’t even know about their travel — that’s the biggest concern.”

In an interview with the Star, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said the issue of monitoring the travel of convicted sex offenders is “one of the very significant issues that does need to be addressed.

“There are no exit records that are kept of these individuals, so it’s very difficult for us to know whether someone is in fact leaving the country for those purposes.”

Given the global nature of the exploitation of children — UNICEF estimates that about 2 million kids around the world are involved in the illicit sex trade — Toews says Canada’s responsibility is greater than ever.

He pointed out that the government has already tightened rules for the National Sex Offender Registry, such as the automatic inclusion of all convicted offenders and the mandatory collection of their DNA samples.

“Are there additional steps I would like to see taken?” he said. “Absolutely. Am I encouraging the government to move in that direction? Absolutely.”

Toews declined to give details about what measures the government could introduce, but indicated reforms to allow more information-sharing regarding offenders among law enforcement and border agencies in Canada — and with sex tourism destination countries — are possible.

By any measure, Canada’s pursuit, prosecution and punishment of its travelling sex offenders has been feeble, its commitment to protecting children abroad crippled by gaping loopholes in regulations, a near-complete lack of communication among agencies responsible for monitoring sex offenders and few resources for intensive on-the-ground investigations overseas.

The Sex Offender Information Registration Act stipulates that a person on the registry must notify authorities of absences from home only if they are away more than seven days — which means that quick trips to increasingly popular destinations for Canadian sex tourists like Cuba need not be reported.

The act does not specify how much time can pass before departure notification must be given, so there is nothing to stop a convicted sex offender from alerting authorities shortly before boarding a plane.

There is even a provision for offenders to give notice once they have left the country, “within seven days after the date of their departure.”

And even if convicted sex offenders decided to give advance details of their travel dates, they are under no obligation to identify which countries they planned to visit.

“Offenders have to notify us when they are leaving, but they don’t have to tell us where they are going,” says Royal Canadian Mounted Police Insp. Larry Wilson, who runs the National Sex Offender Registry. “It’s a problem for the countries that are going to be receiving them.”

He said more than half of the people on the registry have been convicted of sexual crimes against children.

There is no way of tracking which countries a convicted sex offender has visited. Front-line passport control officers from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) do not have access to the names of the 30,000 Canadians on the National Sex Offender Registry or the 16,000 on the Ontario sex offender database, maintained by the OPP.

Nor do these agents have direct access to the Canadian Police Information Centre database, which contains data on previous convictions and outstanding warrants.

Instead, intelligence officers who work at the CBSA’s national targeting centre provide a sort of “lookout” list to the primary border inspectors with information on people deemed necessary to watch for as they return from abroad.

The privacy rules governing the Sex Offender Registry restrict its use solely to law enforcement officers directly involved in policing sex offences — which would exclude border agents.

“The idea is to provide as much privacy to the offenders as possible,” explains the RCMP’s Wilson, acknowledging that that may appear to be “pandering to the offenders.”

Toews says giving border agents more access to those vital databases “has been under discussion in various places.”

“I can see the CBSA taking over a greater role in identifying sex offenders who have been convicted overseas or those who would like to travel overseas.”

Enforcing stricter travel rules among convicted offenders would mean curbing the privacy rights of people who may have already served time for their crimes, but that is a trade-off child rights advocates say is worth it.

“If you are going to be adding rights for some people — in this case, children who are risk of being sexually abused — that usually means you are taking rights away from someone else,” says Hecht of Beyond Borders. “I think that’s a reasonable limit.”

Hecht says it makes no sense for the RCMP, Passport Canada and the CBSA to operate extensive databases that don’t talk to each other.

“All these different systems that could help with protecting children from sexual exploitation seem to be operating in these artificial silos,” he says. “Right now, we don’t catch these people unless it’s by accident.”

And we don’t catch too many of them.

Canada’s five domestic convictions for child sex tourism in 16 years gives it one of the worst records of any major Western country when it comes to cracking down on its travelling sex offenders.

“Other countries have already broken a pathway, but you have to have some kind of moxie to do it — and we just didn’t do it,” said Lloyd Axworthy, who helped bring in the sex tourism legislation in 1997, when he was foreign minister.

According the figures released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 205 Americans have been convicted as travelling child sex offenders since 2003. In the U.K., 457 people have been arrested in just the past four years for sexual offences against children abroad.

Even accounting for Canada’s smaller population, on a per capita basis that still puts Canada’s prosecution record at four times less than the American rate and 40 times less than the U.K.

Australia, with only two-thirds the population of Canada, has arrested 31 of its citizens for child sex tourism in the past seven years.

A confidential RCMP report on child sex tourism obtained by the Star under access-to-information legislation warns that the number “of Canadian travelling child sex offenders is likely greater than previously thought” and states bluntly that better policing “could uncover many more Canadian offenders committing sexual offences abroad,”

“The cases so far have been just fortuitous — it is not like there were just any police investigations on the ground,” says Liberal Sen. Mobina Jaffer, who has pushed for tougher action to combat sex tourism and human trafficking in Senate hearings on the law.

The RCMP has 37 liaison officers posted in various countries, but they handle everything from drugs to human smuggling. None is assigned to child exploitation cases full-time.

Police cannot operate as law-enforcement officers in a foreign country, but they can work alongside local authorities in their investigations.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deploys dozens of special agents in 48 countries, designating child exploitation as the “major pillar” of their mission in popular sex tourism destinations.

“We cast the widest web we can,” says Special Agent Patrick Redling, unit chief of the Child Exploitation Investigations Unit within the DHS. “Without having boots on the ground it would be very difficult for us to investigate these crimes.”

His agents accompany local police in surveillance, arrest and intelligence operations.

“The U.S. is way ahead of us,” says Jaffer. “To just say we have a sex tourism law on the books and not to spend the resources means we’re not serious about the issue, and that’s what really bothers me.”

Insp. Sergio Passin, in charge of the RCMP’s international operations, says the Mounties don’t have the budget to station more officers overseas.

But he says he is working on a new national strategy on travelling sex offenders that would include plugging loopholes in the law, more co-operation with police forces within Canada and abroad and better intelligence-gathering.

“We should not be waiting for something to fall into our lap,” he said. “We need to be pro-active.”

While promising tougher action at home, Public Safety Minister Toews says he’d prefer that Canadians who seek illegal sex with children abroad get punished where they commit the crime, in part because they might end doing more prison time.

But the confidential RCMP report on child sex tourism makes it clear that police in these often impoverished countries are ill-equipped to handle the problem because of “lack of resources, corrupt officials and a level of societal acceptance.”

The RCMP concludes by echoing those countries’ plea for more help: “They want and expect action from Canadian law enforcement in addressing Canadian travelling sex offenders.”

The Ugly Canadians is a series produced jointly by the Toronto Star and El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister publication of The Miami Herald.

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